He thinks when he's gone and dead and rotting they'll write stories about them.
He's a goddamn tragedy in a black suit and tie with so much red in his ledger he figures he's stained to the bone now, with black hair and black eyes and a will to live left behind, standing next to his brother in a dusty, beat up bar in the middle of nowhere.
He's hollowed out inside, though he sweats out a haze of thick, inconstant, dubious emotion under the El Ray fervour that smothers whoever gets too close, that smothers her whenever she looks over at him or her fingers dance along his arm as she hides the gun in the flower pot.
He's bad and he's ruined, the shadows on the wall are chasing him and the voices that he hear at night scream at him inside and it is with no passion that he screams back.
She keeps him though, like a trinket on her bedside she keeps him, like a broken toy you're too bitter to throw away she keeps him, and he doesn't think he'd mind all that much if she didn't look at him like that sometimes, with that look in her eye like the last sputter of fire before it finally burns out, and there's nothing to keep the monsters that live in the darkness away.
Like she hopes. Like she thinks he could ever be the echo of a man that he once was, like she still looks at him like he is – as if he could burn down a city when he's nothing more than a charred set of bones.
She's bad for him and him for her – she's trying to bring a dead man back to life and he's stealing, blighting the sprout of passion inside her, taking the light with him to the grave.
Dead man walking the voices will whisper at him sometimes, and he has this sudden, strange impulse to laugh at them because he burned out a long time ago, and there's not a single part of him that fears death. (He thinks he might crave it sometimes, but that would require such an aspect of being that he forgot how to be a long time ago.)
He hates it when the voices reach out to her, though, when they embrace her as predator does prey, when they taunt and tease and torment him, dancing above her head and pressing deaths kiss on her lips. They cackle at him when he sits up a little straighter, when he almost reaches out, almost a flicker of something buried deep beneath, when they know the flicker will die out as quickly as the rest of him does.
He's in broken pieces all scattered over the floor, and he knows she wants to pick him up, but she's starting to slip under the weight of him, like porcelain she's starting to crack, and he knows he's tainted her for long enough.
When he'd sunk to the bottom he'd thought there was no lower for him to go, but he still manages to cut himself as he tumbles into oblivion, as he leaves her in a crappy hotel room with dirt on the windows and a crack in the ceiling, with money to get by and a car, too, and a few parting words he think might consist of a note.
He finds his way into a bar, he drinks until he can't see straight and the pain in his head is only numbing, not splintering. He drinks without reason, and so he sees none, when he roars and laughs with no mirth, and swings his arms around in loose punches that land in the air more than anything.
The claws that grab at him are much too real for his liking, when they haul him out of the dark bar into an even darker alleyway, chuckling as he heaves the contents of his stomach out onto the street, coughing.
There are hands on him then, and he shudders away, choking on something foul in the back of his throat as he presses himself against the wall, and through his drunken blur, there is an unmistakeable slice of fear, and though it makes his eyes go wide and sweat trickle on his forehead, it is the most vibrant thing he's felt in months.
"You didn't think I'd let you go that easy, did you?"
Seth looks up, bringing a hand to cover his eyes as he does, but it doesn't matter how long he stares or how much he blinks, she's still there, kneeling in front of him and blotting out the sun like a goddamn angel, while he crawls in the gutter beneath her, like the ruined (demon) man he is.
"Kate."
He shakes his head, curling around himself as she attempts to reach out to him again, and finally, finally, she sees the jagged pieces of him he can't jam back together, and the utter torment in his eyes as she is reflected back to him.
"I'm- I'm no good, Kate. Why can't you see that? I killed your father and your brother and no matter what I do, I can't escape mine."
He curls his fist, doesn't react when the knife he keeps up his sleeve slices into his palm and, opening up into a bloody smile, it drips from his hand.
"I'm ruined."
For the first time in months, she doesn't look at him as though he is a brooding look away from jamming his pocket knife into his chest, or as though she's got enough light in her eyes to blight out the darkness for the both of them, no, it is with a sudden onslaught of hot-blooded anger that she snatches his clenched fist in her own open palm, tears it open and brings the knife to her open hand, slicing it open with a flick of her wrist.
He chokes on a gasp, plucking the knife from her grip and throwing it over her shoulder, grabbing her shoulder tightly and glaring at her.
"WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?"
There is a look of no other, a solid stubbornness in her eyes as she shakes his hands away.
"Stop it. Just stop it, Seth!" She cries suddenly, standing.
He blinks up at her, craning his neck to see her.
"I understand that you're in pain. Believe me, more than anyone, I understand. But I cannot let you fall apart on me, when you are all that I have. And if I have to hold you together for all the time that you are by my side, I will. I'll do it Seth."
There is a single tear that drips down on her cheek, and as she reaches to wipe it away, she leaves her skin blood-stained, and Seth thinks that she is not porcelain any more. She sinks down in front of him, her voice wavering.
"So if you're gonna sit in this alleyway, if you're gonna slice open your hands and wait to die, then so am I."
He thinks that she's never burned brighter than she does now, with blood on her cheeks and tears in her eyes, surrounded by squalor and the unmistakeable pungent scent of misery surrounding her, as she sits on her knees and waits to die.
He doesn't know what it is about Kate, what it is about her that brings out the worst and best of him, but if for a night, and if this really only is for a night, she can get him to claw his way out of the impassive despondency he'd dug his way into, he figures the least he can do, is not let her rot away in an alleyway.
He winds his arms around her, cradling her as he sits back, but he's the one to sob into her hair, to clutch to her as tightly as he can while his cries, muffled into her shirt, and she soothes him gently, stroking his hair and bringing his face close to hers so she can kiss his forehead, his cheeks, his chin, growing almost hysterical as he has.
She supports him with an arm under his shoulder and waist as she deposits him in the back of the car, throwing her head back against the head rest and pressing her foot against the gas pedal and he falls into a dreamless sleep (like heaven, it is).
/
When he wakes up, and he can't see Kate, there is a sudden urge to panic.
He's in a hotel room, that much he can figure out from the static television and the unmistakable ache in his back that he's used to from the cheap beds, but he can remember little leading up to the events that got him there in the first place.
When Kate steps out of the bathroom, fully clothed but her hair dripping wet, the events of the previous night hit him like a brick in his face, and he dumbly recognizes he still has a dull sting in his (now bandaged) hand and a headache that he thinks must be the effect of the sobbing he'd done into Kate's shoulder.
She raises an eyebrow when he doesn't say anything.
"Listen, Kate, I'm sorr-"
"Don't." She snaps at him, a warning clear in her eyes. "Don't do that, Seth. You have nothing to apologise for. Last night was the first time we've really spoken in months and you are not going to feel bad about it."
He goes to speak again, to say what he doesn't know, but he figures it'd probably be useless anyway when Kate speaks over him.
"You got real low, I know that, alright? But I'm not gonna let that happen to you again, you hear me? Me and you, you and me, we're gonna be fine."
He can't help but crack a smile at that.
"We're gonna be a whole lotta things, Katie, but fine sure as hell ain't one of them."
/